REVIEW 7 cited by
Investigating the Indirect Object Identification circuit in Mamba
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Investigating the Indirect Object Identification circuit in Mamba
read the original abstract
How well will current interpretability techniques generalize to future models? A relevant case study is Mamba, a recent recurrent architecture with scaling comparable to Transformers. We adapt pre-Mamba techniques to Mamba and partially reverse-engineer the circuit responsible for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. Our techniques provide evidence that 1) Layer 39 is a key bottleneck, 2) Convolutions in layer 39 shift names one position forward, and 3) The name entities are stored linearly in Layer 39's SSM. Finally, we adapt an automatic circuit discovery tool, positional Edge Attribution Patching, to identify a Mamba IOI circuit. Our contributions provide initial evidence that circuit-based mechanistic interpretability tools work well for the Mamba architecture.
Forward citations
Cited by 7 Pith papers
-
WriteSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Recurrent State
WriteSAE introduces sparse autoencoders with rank-1 matrix atoms for recurrent state updates, allowing replacement tests that outperform deletion on 92.4% of positions and a formula predicting logit changes with R²=0.98.
-
WriteSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Recurrent State
WriteSAE is the first sparse autoencoder that factors decoder atoms into the native d_k x d_v cache write shape of recurrent models and supplies a closed-form per-token logit shift for atom substitution.
-
WriteSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Recurrent State
WriteSAE decomposes recurrent model cache writes into substitutable atoms with a closed-form logit shift, achieving high substitution success and targeted behavioral installs on models like Qwen3.5 and Mamba-2.
-
Detection vs. Execution: Single-Bucket Probes Miss Half the Mamba-2 State Sink
Single-bucket probes in Mamba-2 recover only the small BOS-specialist execution layer of the state sink while missing the larger dual-head detection layer with the same representational signature.
-
WriteSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Recurrent State
WriteSAE factors sparse autoencoder decoder atoms to the native d_k x d_v cache write shape in recurrent models, provides a closed-form logit shift, and demonstrates high success in atom substitution and behavioral ed...
-
Hidden State Poisoning Attacks against Mamba-based Language Models
Short input phrases can irreversibly overwrite hidden states in Mamba models, impairing information retrieval on a new benchmark while leaving pure Transformer models unaffected.
-
Mechanistic Interpretability for Neural Networks: Circuits, Sparse Features and Symbolic Reasoning
A scoping review surveying circuit analysis, sparse autoencoders, activation steering, and neurosymbolic frameworks for interpreting and controlling Transformer-based neural networks.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.